Alignment
Always align to the left. Unless you're in a hurry.
I step out of the train, and get in the line. I only look at the person in front of me, until it's time to step out of the line and head home.
The room where I work is overly heated, because ABS plastic only 3d prints well in heat conditions.
It's a mix of high and low tech. Avant-garde research in semi-neglected public school buildings.
Maybe tomorrow I will see where the money is made, the engineering campus “Ito”. One hour away by train.
Me and Anderson, the Brazilian doctoral student who shares the room with me, are having conversations about people's irrational relations to insects. But when he talks of cockroaches and mosquitoes, I think of Palestinians? I find backing with Sara Ahmed's "Performativity of Disgust".
How would Israelis react to a Palestinian controlled robot who moves like an insect and smiles like a Pokemon? This is too crazy.
There are so many open questions on how I will build this creature.
It has to be modular, otherwise I will lose my mind in it.
Task number 1 - Find out how to make modular silicone.
Task number 2 - Jot down the modules.
I'm keeping some distance from people. At a 2nd degree of 'awayness', I am somewhat of a ghost. Examining people from within the brim.
Arrival
Japan, don't make me fall in love again.
You know I have a soft stomach.
I am not the same man that you remember. I've been scorched by light. The light of the sun, the light of knowledge, of love reflecting from the ice.
Today you were good to me. You know I have a weakness for compassion.
A cop in the police station saw me fumble with my phone and insisted on directing me to the nearest Ramen restaurant. A man in the Ramen restaurant insisted on buying me a noodle refill - A gesture for a foreign student friend, he said. Again the hair on my arm became an attraction. I still find it hard to understand how is it that you shun from hand shaking, but have no inhibitions for feeling someone's arm-hair without asking.
You're also interested in what I do.
Tomimatsu-sensei, my professor in-charge, is interested in organizing a Soft Robotics workshop. I happen to know how to do that. If I am able to build my Palestinian robot under this framework, I need to look no further.
Both Finland and Japan have a sterile purity to them that leaves me baffled.
Both of them invite you to dig deeper into their soul, until you reach the dirt, but without actually saying that.
However, they are not the same.
I finished reading "Conversations on Science, Culture and Time".
This is a book I'd like to buy and keep, so I can open it up every once in a while and be inspired.
Next on my list:
* The Cultural Politics of Emotion
* Gravity and Grace
*Click*
